DIY practices in 1990s fashion: Notes from Alexander McQueen's early years (1992–1996)

Abstract

Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) was certainly one of the greatest fashion designers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Creator of an authorial work McQueen has become the subject of study of numerous researchers. In this article, using a sociological approach, we’ll analyze the designer's early creative phase, specifically his production between the years 1992 and 1996. Reflecting on some of his esthetic results, this article seeks to characterize how DIY appears in his work as a type of epistemological solution conditioned to social, political, and economic issues. Thinking about the gains that come from using DIY as well as the concessions that are made when his work is absorbed into the fashion mainstream, McQueen will be taken as a heuristic example that helps us describe and qualify even more complex phenomena of contemporaneity as the change in the fashion system and the new phases of capitalism.